Sunday, May 9, 2010

Christian Worldview of Origins

I'm teaching a class at our church called the Christian Worldview of Origins. Our culture today is so biased towards a humanist/evolutionary worldview, that many Christians feel like they have to compromise.

There have been some good questions so far in our classes, and this is a pretty good forum to address some of those.

One of the questions was, "How do evolutionists handle the question of poly-strata fossils?" I went looking on the most popular evolutionist debate site (www.talkorigins.org), and this is what they had to say:

As for Malone's "problem" with the "thousands of years" for the tree to remain upright for "slow accumulation" to occur, it is a non-problem - he is simply interpolating the average depositional rates for an entire formation down to the scale of metres. This is not the correct way to do it, because individual beds can be deposited rapidly (say, sands and mud during a levee breach), and then little deposition can occur for a long time (e.g., a soil horizon), as is observed in modern river floodplain environments where trees commonly occur. In short, he is assuming conventional geologists would interpret the occurrence the simple way he has interpolated - they do not.

Essentially, layers of soil accumulate slowly over millions of year unless you can prove otherwise, like with poly strata fossils. Or evolution happens just like WE say it does, except for the all of those times when organisms stay constant in the fossil record.